The Quizbowl Resource Center

ezubaric

Mods: feel free to delete or move ... I've never seen a post like this on the board before, but I'm probably the only person who'd make such a post.

ezubaric

If you have a bachelors degree or a masters degree and are looking to do a PhD, I'm looking for a PhD student who is interested in the relationship between the trivia community and the machine learning community to look at questions like "how does preventing cheating in online quiz bowl tournam...

ezubaric

From a machine learning perspective, it would make quiz bowl much more valuable as a training set (e.g., to see how a journal article gets rewritten as a question and to check whether IR systems are finding the right sources). If anybody wanted to try doing this for a tournament, we could probably t...

ezubaric

Bumping this, as we now have information on prizes. Up to $500 in prizes are available, and only requires two nights!

25 Sep: sign up
Oct: Prelim
11 Dec: Final

ezubaric

You may know us for building QANTA, the quizbowl AI system (and side projects for playing QB online, writing questions free of stock clues, etc.). We’re building on our previous systems to not just have computers play trivia games but to help humans play trivia games better. To do this, we’re introd...

ezubaric

I meant to respond to this earlier, but got sidetracked with the start of the semester. For pronunciation help, I think that there are more straightforward thing that could be done with existing tools ( embarrassing project I did along these lines a long time ago ). For question generation, I think ...

ezubaric

This will be questions in the style of Natural Questions, indeed, rather than normal quiz bowl questions. But because the quality of questions is non-uniform, we'll make sure that the questions we select are interesting and of the sort that quiz bowlers would appreciate (e.g., more like interesting ...

ezubaric

A few years ago, we hosted a competition between human and machine teams, and we're looking to do it again this year (with support from Google). This Medium posts explains the competition a little bit more than the official announcement (which is linked): https://medium.com/@alexmoltzau/a-google-que...

ezubaric

I think the "play-along" aspect of Finals is something that a) is fun and participatory from afar and b) has been very hard to capture outside of a live setting. I'm talkin' bout when the whole audience is whispering to each other before, after, and during the buzzes. ("would you hav...

ezubaric

The were used on QBlitz, but now that's over we should be posting packets. The JSON versions are coming soon, but in the meantime, we have Google Docs for the impatient. http://trickme.qanta.org Videos / press release are hopefully coming in the next couple of weeks along with our publication announ...

ezubaric

We have space at UMD. We have offered to discuss using our TV studios. I have yet to get an answer. I suspect this is just a ploy to get more sponsorship dollars (see their latest social media posts).

That said, if anybody know anybody competent there and can get me in touch with them ...

ezubaric

Sorry for the delay. My first priority was getting checks out to people, and we have mostly complete stats here: http://users.umiacs.umd.edu/~jbg/qb/2018_QANTA/2018_qanta_games.html I know there is one missing game of Monticello vs. Technical Wizards, which I'll have to recreate from the video. Vide...

ezubaric

Congrats to the teams that competed in our tournament today! Computer Division: FYY High School: Monticello College: Maryland A Open: Rage Against the Machine Full prize information, stats, and videos after I get grades in. In the meantime, please don't discuss questions as we're going to have an on...

ezubaric

Please join us at the University of Maryland for our first Human-Computer Question Answering competition. Our event will be in the Language Science Center: https://languagescience.umd.edu/about/directions Please come to HJP 2130 between 8:15 and 8:45 for registration and some breakfast foods. We’ll ...

ezubaric

We just got some new interest from some high school teams ... we could expand the field if we just had one or two more teams.

No registration fee, no packet writing requirements ... just show up! (First come first served.)

If you're interested, sign up on http://qanta.org

ezubaric

We've extended the deadline for registering for the computer half of the competition to November 28. We currently have 16 computer teams registered: * SFU NLP * Simplifai * ugrad * Studio OUSIA * Clever Name TBD * FYY-723 * 723 WT * Z - NLP * FFT * Iota * QaQa Land * Forward Thinking * CALEZH * Epsi...

ezubaric

Two brief updates. The framework for computer teams to submit systems is now online: https://pinafore.github.io/qanta-leaderboard/ We're still accepting human registrations for the waiting list. If we get to 14 teams, we'll likely expand the field. Preference will be given to those writing questions.

ezubaric

Here's a question about the write.qanta interface that I don't think I can figure out without going in and trying it: if I start writing a question, at what point is it submitted to the website? That is, if I start writing a question with the answer "John Doe", am I locked into having a J...

ezubaric

Yes, that's right. It's probably not worth getting into details, but there are multiple signals that we can use to generate whether something has been asked about: Jeopardy!, other trivia questions online, etc. We don't think showing those questions are worth showing to quiz bowl writers, though. Th...

ezubaric

While I understand the motivation to have answerlines that have come up before, but I'm a little confused by the situation. Is the write.qanta site supposed to restrict your answer to things that have Wikipedia articles and have been asked about in at least three archived questions? At the moment t...

ezubaric

We're getting more great questions ... following the usual strategy of posting on the webpage and the message boards. Q: I can't find my favorite answer in the system. Why is this? This is a design decision that we made. These are the answer for which there have been three answers in mainstream quiz...

ezubaric

Had some good questions come through. Updated the webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/qanta/dec-15-2018 and also posting fuller answers here. Are the packets really going to be 50 tossups? Q: What's the format of the games? Why is it structured like that? We'll have 40 questions, tossups only. If...

ezubaric

No, we'll edit down to 40 + tiebreakers.

ezubaric

Human field update: * Roger Bork TBA * Quizbowl: A "Bag of Nerds" Approach to Named Entity Recognition Sam Spaulding, Stephen Leh, Isaac Park * still working on a name Drew Scheeler + TBA * Maryland A Graham Reid, Caleb Kendrick, Weijia Cheng, Justin Hawkins * What to Do After You Hit Retu...

ezubaric

If we had the requisite data at a tossup level, we could do a pretty good job of estimating it:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05559

(And we could probably find something more interpretable than these MoE weights.)

ezubaric

We had some complaints from people considering writing packets (without playing) that the payment for just writing a packet (50 TU) or half packet (25 TU) should be more than that of a team that also plays. We agree with that logic, and have upped the payment for half and full packets to $75 and $15...

ezubaric

Some questions that we've gotten on submitting questions, added to the FAQ on the webpage: Q: Can we blend subcategories/categories? Feel free to blend subcategories and categories. Our distribution requirements aren't super strict. But don't use blending to avoid writing about topics (e.g., "r...

ezubaric

We agree with the problematic name and have been in communication with the team, all future references to the team will use Robert Bork.

ezubaric

Okay, 600 it is. I realize that people use Google Docs, but "lines" is arbitrary, and it's not just that questions need to be submitted on qanta.org, but if you want to do well in the question writing competition, you'll need to do your final editing there (e.g., to make sure that you have...

ezubaric

Aplogies for cross posting , but we've had a dearth of HS signups, and we'd really like more high school teams. We’re hosting a December 15 event that aims to match top human teams against computer algorithms in a fun competition. https://sites.google.com/view/qanta/dec-15-2018 Because this is a pac...

ezubaric

Yes, we have optimized for HSNCT questions in the past, so that obviously guided my thinking. If there's a strong consensus for longer questions, I'm certainly open to that. How about 600? That's actually pretty long. (At the moment, however, the system will accept anything, so this is all open to d...

ezubaric

Field Update (10/8/18): Maryland A [Redacted] Sam Spaulding, Stephen Leh, Isaac Park Drew Scheeler,... Michael Bentley, Jeremy Eaton, Sam Braunfeld Will Alston, Jordan Brownstein, Daniel Hothem At least one spot left for sure, but we'll take additional registrations for waitlist or possible field e...

ezubaric

Is there a length guideline for submitted questions? Try not to go over 500 characters of questions, and unless the question is exquisitely crafted, try not to go under 400 characters. This is a really important point, thanks! We'll update the question submission interface to reflect this and also ...

ezubaric

We're about a week away from our deadline for packet-writing teams (which is hopefully most teams), and we don't yet have enough teams to have a viable tournament. To help people matchmake, if you'd like to find a teammate or just want to write a packet for fun, please add your information here (sep...

ezubaric

There have been several people interested in team forming. Please post here if you're looking to form a team for either writing a packet or forming a team to compete! At the moment, we currently have four teams registered, but we hope to get to at least seven. We'll start doing weekly field updates ...

ezubaric

Perhaps move tournament to Sunday to get around the TV tournament issue?

ezubaric

Given the lack of registrations for question writers and teams, we're changing the field size and fee structure. Our goal is to bootstrap a new competition framework. If you help write questions, the tournament will be free (or better). This is not a normal tournament. If you only submit a half pack...

ezubaric

We've updated the page to answer questions about question distribution, preferences for teams, and fees. Copy pasted below: Distribution (Derived from PACE) Numbers represent half and full packet requirements. 4/8 Literature 4/8 History 5/10 Science 3/6 Fine Arts 3/6 Religion, Mythology, Philosophy,...

ezubaric

You can view the video of our past event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf5GHwDb6Ig And the official announcement is here: http://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&p=349431#p349431 I'm certainly interested in suggestions for how to best convey that we're interested in soliciting qua...

ezubaric

You can view the video of our past event here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf5GHwDb6Ig

And take part in the next iteration here:

http://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 31#p349431

ezubaric

I’m happy to announce that we’ll be hosting a truly open tournament at the University of Maryland on December 15. Open not just to all levels of human players but also to computer competitors. https://sites.google.com/view/qanta/dec-15-2018 We’ve put on a number of previous exhibition matches, but t...

ezubaric

vinteuil wrote: ↑Fri Sep 07, 2018 11:31 pm trash tournament or some vanity set

We'll also be using a standard distribution, for what it's worth. The biggest difference will be changes to format (tossup only), eligibility (all human players eligible, computer teams welcome), and prizes for question writers.

ezubaric

Sorry for not responding earlier; I don't read the boards as closely as I used to! Instead, you chose to advertize an experimental set that's practically guaranteed to be full of quirks and faults as equivalent to a standard open tournament. Thanks for bringing this up; one of the reasons that we've...

ezubaric

It will be packet submission, but with computers helping to write the questions. (Similar to our experimental round at PACE in June.)

ezubaric

It'll be hosted at UMD.

ezubaric

We'll be announcing soon an open tournament for December that is open to high school teams, college teams, grizzled veterans, and computers.

ezubaric

Hell, we actually lost money on SCT this year because the profit from the attending teams wasn't enough to cover the registration fee for the house teams. That ain't good, but it isn't the first time it happened. At the first Rocky Mountain SCT, I paid for the house teams personally so as to not dr...

ezubaric

Of course, ACF is free to do whatever it likes. It makes the rules and folks need to play by those rules. That said, sometimes the policies that are sensible and workable in mature regions with powerhouse HS teams just aren't applicable to regions where QB is weak: it becomes a question of consisten...

ezubaric

We now have a new video (better editing) here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf5GHwDb6Ig

ezubaric

Thanks for everyone who helped make tonights event a lot of fun. Not spoiling any results, as I'm hoping to upload video tomorrow morning.

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